PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has lost nearly half of its players since January as Sanhok map goes live

Alas, poor PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, we’ve entered the second phase of your musician biopic when the fans start leaving. Sure, the game was riding high in January with 3.2 million concurrent players on Steam. But we’re six months away from that now and the game is now down to 1.7 million concurrent players. These are clearly not numbers to scoff at, but they’re also easy to see as a sign that the game hits its peak and then has started turning downward.

What’s caused the drop? Lots of factors are obvious culprits, including the success (and free-to-play nature) of Fortnite and the simple decay of interest over time, but there’s no obvious magic bullet. Feel free to speculate about it whether you play or not. The game clearly isn’t about to die, but if you thought there was no upper limit on its playerbase, it looks like that’s been proven false.

Meanwhile, for the folks still going strong, the Sanhok map has dropped.

– PUBG has horrifically slow content update
– PUBG is laggy and buggy as fuck
– PUBG doesn’t add anything new over H1Z1.
– PUBG isn’t that exciting due to the game mechanics

in other words, any competent AAA game company can easily beat PUBG. Battlefield or CoD battle royale is going to be the fucking nail in the coffin for PUBG.

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11 months ago

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Danny Smith

tfw you are an up and coming mmo then wow comes out.

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11 months ago

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dixa

it’s a flash-in-the-pan genre that is now saturated with too many clones of a simplistic and shallow game type, a game type that only rose to fame because of the obsession with twitch, ad revenue and being an obnoxious millennial.

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11 months ago

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Paragon Lost

I know Bree doesn’t like the term but seriously most of the players are content locust. They come, they devour and they move on to the next/newest fix. Per Wiki this game released in December 2017 PC/X-Box. Also, F2P is a bane upon the mmo gaming world because players are used to something for nothing. What a short run these damn things have anymore.

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11 months ago

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Line

It grew like crazy since release in march 2017.
Then Fortnite came out and tore it apart.
And this is definitely not a case of “content locusts”. PUBG is not F2P, nor did it die quickly. It started a phenomenon.

Fortnite is F2P however. It’s also a better game with a gigantic content lead over everything else.
Also the ultimate proof that F2P can crush all other content models. Hell, it created its own model with an optional “season pass” to unlock stuff by regular play, which everyone is copying now (including PUBG – best seller on Steam right now).

Why would players get used to something for nothing when you literally have something better for nothing?
Jeez, I wonder.
MMOs have some serious self reflection to do.

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11 months ago

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Robert Mann

I’d say it’s “Newest thing” hoppers instead. As soon as the next big game type hits, these games will drop massively. For now, that newest thing for them (competitive PvP) is Fortnite due to many reasons, including what you said.

I’d still say that’s a content locust mentality, just that it’s less about the content (either PvE or PvP launch grief trying to make people quit) and more about the very twitch/esports, popularity, and the desire to be the next big thing in that industry. *I’ll gladly note it being an entertainment industry, but like most of those I do not see the appeal people find in it!*

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11 months ago

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Bruno Brito

Also, F2P is a bane upon the mmo gaming world because players are used to something for nothing. What a short run these damn things have anymore.

I disagree, but ok.

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11 months ago

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luxundae

I quite enjoy Plunkbat. Tried Fortnite and it didn’t really do anything for me (which is frustrating because I really excited about the PvE game they were building a few years back, but it seems like that’s largely been dropped by the wayside at this point).

*shrug* But nothing lasts forever and that’s ok. As long as there are still enough people playing now that I can reliably join a round without waiting too long :)

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11 months ago

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Mewmew

Fortnite is staying a bit ahead with it’s non stop updates, changes, tie ins, etc. It’s nice that PUBG is dropping a new map now, but for the most part they have been putting more energy into trying to sue everybody than trying to get new content and updates into the game.

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11 months ago

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agemyth 😩

Game developers don’t normally have much to do with what their legal team does especially when the companies are this big. I’m sure PUBG’s devs are working their asses off, but they certainly aren’t creating the perception that they are doing as much as the Fortnite team.

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11 months ago

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jay

Don’t forget that this is the summer, and many of the northern indoor cats are out playing while the weather is nice. ie, not playing games.

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11 months ago

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Armsbend

And in 6 months Fortnite will lose half to Battlefield, Red Dead and CoD. That is how these things are going to shake out.

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11 months ago

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BDJ

Different games. They are polar opposites. I don’t see it happening.

I hate battle royale games. Absolutely hate them. A buddy of mine gifted me PUBG a couple months ago. I installed it just last week and played a few matches.

Its a jogging / loot simulator. I saw no one until the very end when the map narrowed down. The game looks stale. Its boring with little action.

I promptly uninstalled the game. It plays just like it looks. Boring and stale. Fortnite at least looks better and has different mechanics to the game.

Battlefield BR will kill off PUBG. It might dent Fortnite, but it won’t be much. Battlefield V, Red Dead, and CoD might draw initial players, but they will leave those games and go back to Fortnite. After a few months, CoD and BF are over with most of the time.

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11 months ago

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agemyth 😩

Aside from the potential of Red Dead Online, if it is anywhere near as robust as GTAO, Fortnite’s popularity doesn’t really come from the crowd that would be lured away by the big names that have been pushed out every year or two for the last decade+.

But I will be happy when the Fortnite craze dies down either way. I would rather hear about every minor detail that happened or did not happen in Destiny every week.

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11 months ago

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Armsbend

Not in my opinion. Fortnite hasn’t been around long. People will leave it for something new. And they will.

The same thing happens every new game before shooters started adding more rpg elements – Fortnite has nothing but cosmetic unlocks.

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11 months ago

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Line

Fortnite is free, all those games aren’t.
It wins by default, and by a margin that probably hasn’t even existed in the market until now. We’re talking in the hundreds of millions of players.

RPG elements doomed the shooter market.
The new ones vastly underperformed, and all the latest garbage from Ubisoft like The Division 2 or Anthem from EA will crash and burn like Destiny 2 did.
Don’t mean that they won’t make money, they will. $100 games with mega marketing tend to do that.

But the hamster wheel that infested gaming is now a death sentence, MOBAs and now battle royales are the proof.
They just cater to the mobile market, but completely fail to target the right devices.
The addicts spending millions on meaningless numbers are not the same ones that play PUBG and the like.

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11 months ago

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BDJ

Stop with the hyperbole bro. 100s of millions. Stahp.

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11 months ago

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Mewmew

If they’re able to keep the updates up as they’ve been doing, they won’t lose players nearly as fast.

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11 months ago

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2Ton Gamer

This is not necessarily true as Fortnite came out when Battlefront 2 and the latest CoD had come out. Sure BF2 shot itself in the foot with the lootbox mishap, but still. This game took away from that hype. It might last a bit longer before falling the next trend, but I consider those FPS games more on the declining side.